


I Owe Him a Debt

by Koren M (CyberMathWitch)



Series: The Weight of Us [9]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath, Debts, F/M, Natasha Romanov's Arrow Necklace, Nightmares, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:12:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyberMathWitch/pseuds/Koren%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You owe me."</p><p>This far into their partnership, after everything they've been through, those words were something Natasha never thought she would hear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Owe Him a Debt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Happilydancing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Happilydancing/gifts).



> For happilydancing's prompt:
>
>>  
>> 
>> [Natasha owes Clint a debt. After all these years , she is shocked when he calls it in.](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/412023.html?thread=7836279#t7836279)  
> 
> 
> _Also, this is unfortunately unbeta'd, (apologies in advance for any errors, I think I caught them all but you never know - but thanks as always to SweetWaterSong for cheerleading._

Natasha woke up with her heart racing as adrenaline pumped through her veins, the feel of Clint's body ranged over hers in a way that wasn't at all comforting. His eyes were glazed over - not, she knew at once, from some kind of god's spell, but from the much more human grip of unrelieved nightmares.

Of course, that didn't make the threat of the knife pressed against her throat any less immediate.

She held completely still in the way that she'd been trained, taking in the barest air she could manage, keeping her throat from moving too much against the steel.

Then she began to hum.

Lightly, barely, but she knew he would hear her. Prayed he would hear her. That he would feel the vibrations as they moved through her, skin to skin.

It was a nonsense song. Twenty seconds of melody, give or take, that he tended to favor when he was calm and at ease. She didn't know where it had come from, but she knew each note as intimately as she knew him.

His eyes cleared and his face fell, his hand sweeping out and discarding the knife. Distantly she heard it clatter to the floor, sharp and loud in the otherwise silent room. She watched in the half-light as he struggled to bring in air-

Then he sobbed.

It was a hard, rough sound. She'd heard it before, coming from her own throat, but never from him.

Before he could push away she wrapped around him, arms and legs with as much of her considerable strength as she could bring to bear. He struggled and he fought and he was far too weak to make her let go. One meal and a few troubled hours of sleep couldn't make up for the last three days of hell. She held on, just like he'd held on to her. When she'd shattered against him, years ago, and everything - _everything_ had changed. Because shattering was the best description of what had happened to her, and when she'd managed to put the pieces back together, he'd been inside. Under that skin, that armor, that self. 

Natasha wondered if that's how it would be for him, now, if he would be able to let her in and help him rebuild everything inside him that was breaking.

*****

Worn out, wrung out, but dreading what both sleep and morning might bring, they lay in the dark listening to one another breathe. Her hand ran through his hair over and over, soothing herself more than him. Uncharacteristic perhaps, but necessary.

"They'll come tomorrow," she finally heard herself say. She felt more detached now than she had at any other point while he'd been missing. She felt more detached than she had since before she'd come to the States, come to SHIELD, It was close enough to the "old" Natasha that she could see how easy and seductive it would be to slip back there, to that place where she might once again be able to convince herself that nothing mattered.

That no one mattered.

He didn't tense, or shift in her arms, just continued to press his face into the crook of her neck. "I know."

"It might be the next day." They hadn't watched the news, and she had no real idea how extensive the damage around Midtown was. But she knew they would come. "Stark will give us a car. Nothing will be flying out of JFK for days, but we could drive. Blend in with everyone else leaving the city. If we go in the morning, we can slip through whatever perimeter they're trying to set up."

"Natasha..."

He raised up and she pulled back, put her hands against his face so she could look into his eyes. "If we leave now, we can get to him before dawn and be out of the city before they realize we're gone." Fear that she'd not let herself feel during the previous days suddenly flooded over her, unfamiliar and unwelcome, but persistent. It wasn't SHIELD she was scared of, though. It was what she heard in his voice and saw etched in his face.

Beaten. Resigned. 

_No._

"I said that to you, once," he started, setting his hands over hers to move them away so he could stand up, flinching slightly as it pullled on his back and ribs.

"Clint-" 

"I said we could go, we'd go and fuck SHIELD, and we'd figure out how to handle it, whatever it was that was going on with you."

Natasha followed his example and shoved the sheets off, stood with hard, jerky movements and started pulling on her clothes. She remembered the moment, but wasn't sure where he was going with it. They'd been in Berlin and she'd been half-wild with hallucinations and programmed reactions. She had, in fact, caused a blood bath by slipping back underneath her Red Room programming and as soon as he'd managed to restrain her, they'd run.

"They won't put me down, Natasha. That's not on the table here."

"You don't know that," she hissed. Although the rational corner of her mind, observing it all from that old familiar terrifyingly cold place agreed with him.

"I do. No kind of damage control out there, too many people know. The WSC can't make this go away quietly."

"Fury believes in you. He'd never have let you off the carrier if he didn't."

"Fury was a little bit busy." He sifted through the pile of clothing between the bed and the bathroom door, catching his breath at the pain.

"Getting you back was on the agenda, Clint. He doesn't think you were aware of what you were doing. He saw what Loki did to you." 

"Fury doesn't make these decisions. We both know that. But they won't kill me. They need to make an example out of me. Selvig... he's too soft. Old guy, crack-pot scientist - they need someone stronger to hold accountable. They'll believe that Selvig was brainwashed, but not me."

"The fuck they won't." Temper, and she embraced it, because it was hot, not cold. Anything but the cold right now, because if she froze, she'd never come back from it. "We leave now. Tonight. Today. I can break you out once you're in, but Clint, it'll be a fucking train wreck of dead bodies."

That resignation again, and a half of a smile. "No. You're not gonna break me out. I'm going in. If they come for me, when they decide to come for me, I'm going with them."

"You don't deserve that. You don't deserve what you know they'll do to you, Clint!"

The knife was in his hand and he had her between him and the wall with a speed that belied his injuries.

She didn't flinch, even though the metal was cold. This time, she didn't even control her breathing, knowing good and well that it was the blunt side of the knife against her skin.

"I could've killed you. Just now. Tonight."

"How many times have you woken up with my gun or my knife too close for comfort?"

He smiled, even though they weren't happy memories, per se.

"Too many times. But this is... different. This isn't just PTSD, Nat. It's something else, and I can't trust that I'm okay. In there, I can't hurt anyone else. Don't fight it. Don't fight me, or them on this one. I'm gonna go quietly, let them do whatever it is they want to do." He flipped the knife back, slid it into the sheath and set it aside. 

She let the tears come, because damn it, but she didn't care anymore. He wasn't the only one who'd gone without sleep, had been through emotional hell. "What if they never let you back out? I moved heaven and earth to get you back, and now you want to go away again. This whole thing was your fucking idea, do you remember that? Asking me to come with you, to follow you home like some kind of psychotic pet-"

"Natasha-"

"You convinced me, that there was another way, that maybe, maybe I could find some fucking redemption before I died, that I could leave something else behind besides the blood and the fucking pain."

"And you have-"

"NO. We have. Together. I can live without you just fine. I'm adaptable, I'll fucking _survive_. But I can't do this," she gestured between them, "without you."

"Maybe I was wrong," he admitted, turning away from her. "Is that what you want me to say? I was wrong. Maybe this is all there is, just blood and death, that's what we're trained to do. I need to do this, Natasha. I need you to let me go."

She started to open her mouth again, but he cut her off. "You owe me," he said, and it felt like the floor fell out beneath her.

*****

It was a simple phrase that over the course of their partnership had meant a thousand tiny, insignificant little things. "You owe me" had meant "that was _my_ coffee," or "I covered for you", or "this was your crazy idea, you're doing the paperwork," or even "don't you dare scare me like that again".

This time was different.

"You said once that you owed me, and you didn't like owing debts. So now's your chance to even the books and wipe one more thing out of your ledger."

Words froze in her throat, half-formed but then abandoned. 

Words like _"but it wasn't-"_ and _"I thought you said-"_ couldn't make it past her tongue. She couldn't swallow around them, either. She wasn't sure in that moment she could even breathe.

She'd never expected this from him. He'd always been different. The one person in her life who didn't keep score, who didn't look at her with the weights and balances and manipulations that the rest of the world saw emblazoned on her skin.

For a brief, frantic moment she searched his eyes for the tell-tale blue glow, and she wasn't sure if she was relieved or heartbroken not to see it there.

_in every way he knows you fear_

She did the only thing she could do.

She agreed.

*****

They ended up back in the bed, sitting curled up together against the headboard.

"You can't carry me that far," he mumbled against her hair as they watched the sky start to change, watched color that today made her think of bruises signal the coming day. 

"You don't know what I'm thinking," she muttered darkly.

"I know exactly what you're thinking. You were trying to decide if you could knock me out long enough to spirit me away to some kind of bolt hole you've never told another soul about. But even though you managed to lug my half-conscious ass across several miles of Tunisian desert, not even you can carry me as far as you'd need to for this."

She didn't agree with him, didn't deign to let him know he might be right, so they lapsed back into silence and watched the sun rise over the still smouldering ruins of Manhattan.

After the colors started to fade away, they finished dressing, but returned to the bed to wait.

Maria found them like that, the phalanx of SHIELD heavies behind her doing a good job of not looking surprised. Natasha felt Clint's mouth brush against her as he slipped away from her. She left her hands loose by her sides once he was out of reach; the others were watching them with an understandable weariness as Clint stood up and walked over to Hill and crossed his hands in front of him for the cuffs. 

Maria had the grace to look highly disapproving. With a single word and a hard frown sent the others from the room.

"I can give you a thirty-second window on the way down," she started, but came up short when Clint shook his head. 

"We do his straight. I'm not going to run. It's okay." 

It helped, a little, that Hill seemed as upset about it as she did, Natasha thought. 

Maria didn't cuff her, and gave the one agent stupid enough to ask about it a look that he'd take weeks to recover from. They took the stairs, twenty flights of them, down in a somber procession, and then loaded into unmarked SHIELD SUVs. 

*****

She made it as far as the detention facility, and they stopped her there. Hill ordered her back to the temporary headquarters, and because she was already forming a plan, she obeyed.

Rogers was there, and Thor, taking turns keeping a weather eye on where Loki was chained. She wondered if Loki hadn't been Thor's brother if she'd have been allowed some time alone with him. Yet another thing that might help keep the cold at bay, though it probably wouldn't keep her on the right side of the ledger. (If given the opportunity, she knew she'd happily say "fuck the ledger" and enjoy every moment of it.)

*****

They let him come to the park, because it was a publicity stunt, and she imagined there was quite a bit of debate among the higher-ups as to whether the "superhero" card trumped the "scapegoat" one. Tony always managed to straddle that fence with aplomb, but SHIELD didn't have quite that same flare. It was easy to imagine some PR manager somewhere in the bureaucratic machinery already planning how they would neatly separate the guy with the bow and arrow in the thick of the fighting from the rogue SHIELD agent that helped the enemy plan and obtain supplies for his attack. Clint was non-descript enough that with the sunglasses and no publicly accessible footage of him as Loki's puppet, no civilian would think twice about whether or not they were one and the same.

SHIELD knew. Clint might not believe it, but Natasha had it on good authority that as far as the Carrier crew, and the survivors of PEGASUS, most people believed that Clint was essentially innocent. They'd seen who else had been turned, and knew, if not Clint himself that well, then others who just hadn't been traitor material. 

But to the world outside there was speculation and rumor, and the sick yet omnipresent human desire to turn on one another at the least hint of scandal or intrigue. And fuck if she was going to let it go without doing her part to silence it.

*****

Natasha had known about the little jewelry store in Queens for years, ever since she'd spent five months undercover as a bratva courier. The owners' sons did a nice side business in Brighton Beach moving stolen merchandise, but the couple who ran this branch, the original store, steadfastly refused to be involved and she admired them for it.

The necklace had caught her eye three years ago, and she knew even as she was riding in the cab on the way to the store that it was unlikely it would even be there. She'd almost bought it on impulse back then, but it would've been irresponsible and too risky.

She walked in the door, and it was still there, in the same case that she'd seen it in years ago. The owners didn't recognize her, dressed now in jeans and her black jacket, her hair it's true red instead of the muddy brown it had been before. Even her skin was different, unencumbered by the heavy make-up she'd used to change the look of her bone structure. If they were surprised at the matter-of-fact way she zeroed in on what she wanted, without even bothering to look around, they didn't act like it. 

She put the thin chain on then and there, and knew it wouldn't be coming back off.

*****

**Author's Note:**

> My steadfast and absolute headcanon about the much-speculated arrow necklace is that Natasha bought it herself, as a show of loyalty. (My headcanon also strongly believes that the reason we don't see Clint in Winter Soldier is because he is still in custody, and that Natasha has been fighting behind the scenes to get him released.) 
> 
> So, despite the fact that this wildly contradicts the immediate after-math of "The Avengers" that I wrote in ["Compromised"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/416028), this slots into "The Weight of Us" as well.


End file.
